OpenID

OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol.Community Board MembersCorporate Board MembersNobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we're all a part of the community.Authentication in the context of a user accessing an application tells an application who the current user is and whether or not they're present.Authentication is all about the user and their presence with the application, and an internet-scale authentication protocol needs to be able to do this across network and security boundaries. OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol. Promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation, it allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party service, eliminating the need for webmasters to provide their own ad hoc login systems, and allowing users to log into multiple unrelated websites without having to have a separate identity and password for each. Users create accounts by selecting an OpenID identity provider, and then use those accounts to sign onto any website that accepts OpenID authentication. Several large organizations either issue or accept OpenIDs on their websites according to the OpenID Foundation. The OpenID standard provides a framework for the communication that must take place between the identity provider and the OpenID acceptor (the 'relying party'). An extension to the standard (the OpenID Attribute Exchange) facilitates the transfer of user attributes, such as name and gender, from the OpenID identity provider to the relying party (each relying party may request a different set of attributes, depending on its requirements). The OpenID protocol does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user's identity. Moreover, neither services nor the OpenID standard may mandate a specific means by which to authenticate users, allowing for approaches ranging from the common (such as passwords) to the novel (such as smart cards or biometrics). The term OpenID may also refer to an identifier as specified in the OpenID standard; these identifiers take the form of a unique Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and are managed by some 'OpenID provider' that handles authentication. The current version of OpenID is OpenID Connect 1.0, finalized and published in February 2014, and updated with corrections in November 2014. As of March 2016, there are over 1 billion OpenID enabled accounts on the Internet (see below) and approximately 1,100,934 sites have integrated OpenID consumer support: AOL, Blogger, Flickr, France Telecom, Google, Amazon.com, Canonical (provider name Ubuntu One), LiveJournal, Microsoft (provider name Microsoft account), Mixi, Myspace, Novell, OpenStreetMap, Orange, Sears, Sun, Telecom Italia, Universal Music Group, VeriSign, WordPress, Yahoo!, the BBC, IBM, PayPal, and Steam, although some of those organizations also have their own authentication management.